25 Years After Communism, Eyesores Spur Landmark Debate

The broadcast tower stands at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. By putting Alexanderplatz back on the drawing board, the city is giving up its post-reunification fantasy of rebuilding important sites from scratch, and may allow old rifts over East Germany’s architectural legacy to finally heal. Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

May 27 (Bloomberg) -- The House of Electro-Technology
stretches like a felled skyscraper along the northern edge of
Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, limiting views and impeding traffic in
the heart of the German capital. The shopworn relic of the
former East Germany, an assembly of pre-fabricated glass and
aluminum squares, has been called clunky and dehumanizing. Its
owners say it’s outdated and should be replaced. Christine
Edmaier wants to save it.

“We lose an important part of our history when we tear
these buildings down,” said Edmaier, head of Berlin’s Chamber
of Architects. “It’s not about whether they’re beautiful.”

A quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy and capitalism, while
largely successful, remains a work in progress. Even a
generation later, the legacy of communism continues to weigh on
the region as governments grapple with issues ranging from the
structure of their economies to the quality of food to the fate
of brutalist buildings that clash with newer steel and glass
structures.

Berlin is battling over how much of its communist
architecture to retain, restore, or destroy. The city parliament
is set to vote as early as September on a new plan for the
square immortalized in films as diverse as Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz and the 2004 Matt Damon
vehicle The Bourne Supremacy.

Shopping Destination

The plan could involve offering landmark protection to
buildings on the 20-acre (8-hectare) Alexanderplatz. The popular
shopping destination sits in the heart of East Berlin and is the
now-combined city’s busiest transportation hub -- a tangle of
underground, elevated and street-level train, bus and tram
stops.

Investors who bought properties expecting they’d be able to
build high-rises are worried their plans may be scuttled by
landmarking rules. Joerg Lammersen, head of the Berlin
operations of TLG Immobilien GmbH, which owns the 45-year-old
House of Electro-Technology and four other buildings on
Alexanderplatz, says the city risks falling behind other
European capitals by preserving too many East German relics.

“We can’t afford to keep the square as a museum, it’s too
central for that,” Lammersen said, motioning toward the
monotonous 10-story facade of the Electro-Technology building,
which has been only marginally improved by new window louvres
and entrances. “The architecture is not a highlight.”

Park Inn

Dallas-based Lone Star Funds in 2012 bought TLG as part of
a 1.1 billion-euro ($1.5 billion) property deal -- and is said
to be planning a share offering. Starwood Capital Group LLC,
based in Greenwich, Connecticut, holds a stake in the Park Inn
hotel on the square. Deutsche Bank AG is the biggest tenant at
the House of Electro-Technology.

The area is best known for the needle-shaped television
tower that has become a Berlin icon. Built in 1969 to mark East
Germany’s 20th anniversary, the 368-meter (1,207-foot)-tall
tower is still the country’s highest structure and can be seen
across the city. Otherwise, Alexanderplatz has few memorable
characteristics other than its daunting size and the jumble of
large, socialist-era buildings that now house chain stores,
fast-food restaurants, and fashion discounters.

Death Strip

The prefabricated blocks, built with great fanfare by East
Germany’s star architects in the 1960s and 1970s, still speak
volumes about their history. There’s the House of Travel, former
headquarters of the state-owned travel agency and airline --
within walking distance of the heavily guarded “Death Strip”
of the Berlin Wall that kept citizens penned in. The House of
the Teacher has a Diego-Riviera-style mural depicting
scientists, athletes and a woman holding a baby. At the 37-story
mirror-glass Park Inn, the flagship of the state-owned
Interhotel chain, all the rooms were bugged and prostitutes were
hired to spy on guests.

The buildings stand at odd angles and the area’s only
centerpieces -- the copper and enamel “Fountain of Friendship
Between Peoples” and the “World Time Clock” with a rotating
aluminum calendar -- aren’t centered at all. During Christmas
and Oktoberfest, the plaza fills with pop-up stalls that sell
sausages, candied apples and wool socks. For most of the year,
though, it can feel like a void.

Propaganda Photographs

The contrast with western Berlin’s shopping districts is
stark. Capitalist public spaces tend to serve consumption:
malls, restaurants and cafes. Communist planners, by contrast,
saw their squares and plazas as backdrops to propaganda
photographs and as sites for parades.

“Under socialism, governments used public spaces to show
what progressive and modern states they had,” said Stefan
Wolle, a historian at Berlin’s DDR Museum, which features
exhibits on life in East Germany. “The state was the landowner,
the planner, the tenant. The result was city centers that were
very sterile, dull and overwrought. Alexanderplatz was an
example par excellence.”

When the Wall fell, officials in charge of knitting the
city back together after its 45-year division set their sights
on Alexanderplatz. A 1993 proposal envisioned tearing down most
of the East German blocks, cutting the width of surrounding
streets, and improving access to bordering neighborhoods. The
plan, along with demolitions planned elsewhere in Berlin,
sparked a backlash from East German preservationists.

Bombed-Out Wasteland

“The fate of the city was simply put into the hands of
aging West German politicians and investors,” said Katrin
Lompscher, a Berlin parliamentarian with the opposition, left-leaning Die Linke party, who was 27 when the Wall fell. “People
just wanted to skip over entire development phases and
immediately try to be like New York.”

The biggest changes took place a 10-minute cab ride west of
Alexanderplatz, where the Wall had cut through pre-war Berlin’s
most important square, Potsdamer Platz. A bombed out wasteland
during the division, it now features skyscrapers and cinemas
around a roofed-in plaza after more than 1 billion euros in
investment by Sony Corp. and Daimler AG. In front of the
Brandenburg Gate, a few minutes’ walk to the north, the once-barren Pariser Platz -- flanked by the British, U.S. and French
embassies and the neo-baroque Adlon hotel -- has become the
epicenter of Berlin tourism.

Alexanderplatz proved more difficult because it wasn’t an
empty slate, said Daniel Festag, an architect at HENN GmbH.
“It’s very complicated to make change happen on a big square
like that,” he said, looking down over the area from his office
on the eighth floor of the House of Travel.

Cinema Cube

The biggest differences aren’t readily visible: Sidewalks
were expanded to shrink one of the avenues, there’s a new
underground garage, and commuter tunnels meant to keep
pedestrians off the streets were removed. A handful of buildings
were erected in line with a 1993 master plan by architect Hans
Kollhoff, including a cube-shaped cinema, two hotels and a store
selling washing machines and televisions. At the foot of the TV
tower, Amsterdam-based Redevco Nederland BV is constructing a
five-story building with 14 luxury apartments.

Otherwise, little of Kollhoff’s plan has been realized. A
1990s construction boom was followed by a decade-long slump, and
newly built office space across Berlin stood empty. The
commercial vacancy rate soared to a record-high of 10.4 percent
in 2004, according to broker Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.

Clover Leaf

Alexanderplatz property owners who had been given permits
to tear down East German relics and replace them with high-rises
chose to renovate instead. The Park Inn, the House of Electro-Technology, the House of the Teacher, and the House of Travel
received spruced-up interiors, better plumbing and in some cases
revamped facades.

“Everyone thought Berlin would become like London or
Paris, but when people didn’t come the investments weren’t
necessary,” said Jan Kleihues, the architect who converted the
former East German Centrum department store into a limestone and
glass box owned by the Galeria Kaufhof GmbH chain, one of the
square’s biggest draws. Though he says he once thought the
communist-era structures “wouldn’t last, now I think
differently: those buildings have their own architectural
merits.”

Calls to revisit Alexanderplatz’s fate emerged last year
after a proposal to build the first of Kollhoff’s 10 high-rises,
a 39-story confection by starchitect Frank Gehry. The apartment
building -- four towers connected in a clover-leaf design that’s
atypically whimsical for the area -- is slightly set off from
where it had been sited under the Kollhoff plan. That triggered
hearings to examine whether other zoning changes might be
needed.

Construction Boom

Politicians are eager to take advantage of the recent
construction boom to pull Alexanderplatz out of limbo. Since
contracts allowing owners to develop their properties under the
Kollhoff plan have expired, the city can create new zoning
without worrying about lawsuits from investors.

“There’s a much greater acceptance of the East’s postwar
architecture now that we’ve gained distance from the ideological
debates tied to the division,” said Manfred Kuehne, head of
urban planning in the local government. “Many owners don’t want
to tear down their properties, and maybe it’s time to adjust our
plans.”

TLG is relying on an agreement with the Berlin government
that allows the House of Electro-Technology to be razed and
replaced with taller, more modern structures. Replacing the
House of Electro-Technology would open up Alexanderplatz to the
rest of the city, especially trendy Prenzlauer Berg, a stroller-filled neighborhood often compared to Brooklyn’s Park Slope.

‘Architectural Accents’

That would be smart, Lammersen said, because the city has
largely filled the gaps left behind by war ruins and the
demolition of the Berlin Wall. Now, he says, is the time to
start adding density.

“It’s important for a capital like Berlin to set
architectural accents,” he said. “If this whole area were put
under landmark protection, you’d have the Television Tower and
the Park Inn sticking out by themselves like lonely teeth,
surrounded by the 1960s architecture.”